Japan

A great cooking channel on YouTube

Well, I was hanging out on some other 'chan and got hooked on a Japanese cooking show. Living by the adage that the only real stumbling block in cooking is fear of failure, I gave it a go. Following the video below I was able to complete the dish with relative ease. Figured with the interest in Japanese culture around here, I should share it with you folks.

surrealdeal wrote:
all these asian-type recipes i come across want me to add a bunch of corn starch
what does it do, just make things crunchier?

Typically corn starch is just used to thicken things like glazes, or for building a slurry if you decide to make gravy the blasphemous (non-roux) way. I have also seen it in recipes for batter, for instance if you are frying chicken you might want to have a thicker batter that will stick to your chicken more easily then you would get just using egg and flour.

Personally, I don't use cornstarch much at all, especially for any of the things I mentioned above. For instance, if doing a fried chicken in an East Asian style I would use a batter of potato starch and egg. Southern style I would just heavily season a dredge of flour, no wet.

And if your going to make a gravy, for the love of all that is holy make a roux. It wont be shiny like you get when it is made with cornstarch, which is good because savory things look real sketch when they shine like the glaze in a cherry pie.